The Weighted Companion PC

Foreword

by Brett Thomas

When it comes to great new games, one of the first thoughts on anyone's mind is "POORTTAALL!!" The utterly tongue-in-cheek humour, the innovative gameplay and entertaining (sometimes vexing) level design are enough to make pretty much every gamer find something to love. Proof in point – Joe liked it, and I liked it...and we're the first to admit that we have completely different tastes in games.

It's no wonder, then, that someone would build a tribute to the game. In fact, the real wonder is that it's taken so long for someone to really bother! Fortunately, our resident mod-god Magnus Persson (aka [WP@]Wolverine on our forums) took it upon himself to start the trend.

Enter: The Weighted Companion PC – a very tiny (20cm cube) tribute to one of the best games of 2007. "The pink heart melts the frozen soul of the lonely modder," Wolvie said.

And so, without further ado, I'll hand it over to Magnus to show you the building of the Weighted Companion PC. Cake not included...

Introduction

Once again, I found myself wandering around bored stiff in my apartment. I needed something to fight the boredom with, but what to do? I looked at the big pile of scrap pieces of acrylic that was left over from my Pentagram HTPC build and thought, "I cant let all this acrylic go to waste!" And then it hit me – The Companion Cube!!

Like many others, I am a huge fan of the Portal game – so this would be my tribute to one of the coolest games of 2007. So I set off to build a replica of the Companion cube for a VIA Epia EX1500G. The case itself would be very small—only 20cm cubed—which I thought would be a nice size for a web surfing and MP3 setup.

To make it a little bit harder, I only had about a week to get this done... so this is my first real speed mod. In the end, the whole project went from idea to finished case in just five days.

So, let’s get this thing started...

Cornered

After studying pictures of the cube, I figured that I would start with the most difficult part – the corners. Each corner was made from three pieces of acrylic which were glued together and sanded down.

Once the basic shape was formed, it was time to sand down those corners to create the bevelled edge. You can see some spots on the underside in the pictures above where some of the glue melted little spots of the acrylic – this is OK, because it will be covered in the final product.

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